This is a post I’ve been meaning to do for a while, it’s a direct follow-on to my 2010 post Hi, I’m an Islamophobic. On today’s Outsiders programme with Ross Cameron and Rowan Dean was one of the loveliest people I have ever seen on television. His name is Imam Shaikh Mohammad Tawhidi (pictured), and I want to credit him with motivating me to make this post now. Now let’s get one thing out of the way first, I am genuinely fearful of Muslims more than I am of any other religious organisations, so in that sense I am Islamophobic.

Right – on to business… how did we get here?

In my former post I said you can not prove Christianity, and you cannot disprove it. Or rather I mentioned the Antediluvian Period, which is something most Christians would prefer to ignore. It creates a huge problem – without it there are no Patriarchs, and without the Patriarchs there’s no Covenants with God, and without those there’s no condemnation, and no requirement for a Saviour.

“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” -Romans 3:23-24.

When God reveals himself to Moses he says “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). Abraham exists after the Antediluvian Period, but the Abrahamic Covenant displaces (dispenses with) the Noahic Covenant, and the Noahic Covenant happens at the dawn of the Antediluvian Period. So it is important that it holds some meaning to Christians – many now take the easy route of saying these were just stories – but if they’re only stories then the Sacred Covenants are just stories too. Though I was loathed to admit it, as a Christian I was forced to believe there was an Antediluvian Period. I didn’t care when though, for all I cared it could have been 200,000 years ago. And even that didn’t solve the problem of Adam and Eve – although I never really knew that was a problem since I’d never really been taught properly what the Adamic Covenant is.

You may be wondering where I’m going with all this? Well, I recognise now that you can prove or disprove the claims of Christianity. You can’t absolutely rule out the Antediluvian Period happening at some point in the past due to divine intervention… but the historicity of Moses has been well and truly disproved for example. Now this is a huge problem for Christians it’s the Elephant in the room. Judaism is the first known religion in the world to have been based on a collection of writings. Other religions existed outside of written texts, and religious texts were written about the religion, rather than serving as its blueprint. So any Christian that tells you that they don’t have to believe parts of the Bible they disagree with is selling you a revisionist lie. They might believe it, but the fact of the matter is that it’s not consistent with the formation of Judaism, the beliefs of Jesus and his Disciples, or of first century Jews.

As an atheist I see a lot of intolerance shown towards those of religious faith. This is the same kind of intolerance I used to have regarding others who were not Protestant Christians. I don’t hold those views any more because that would be hypocritical. I was really moved today when I saw Imam Tawhidi on Outsiders. He is a true humanist.

Video © Imam Shaikh Mohammad Tawhidi, 2017. License unknown.

It’s sad that Imam Tawhidi represents the minority of Muslims leaders in Australia. Until today I never knew that true moderates really existed within Islam, although that’s largely due to me not finding out about Shiites. About 85 percent of Muslims are Sunnis, and I would consider the vast majority of them to be “extrmeists” as we use the word. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but I do not believe that Sunni Islam can ever be full reformed. There are too many core beliefs that are incompatible with modern society. I also don’t think that people convert between religious ideologies very readily – it’s not something that most people do in their lifetimes. Which is why atheism has taken a long time to grow – it takes a generation, usually, for change.

Imam Tawhidi also exposed a dirty secret that I actually didn’t know. He said in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t know any Sunni Islamic Scholars (he may have been referring to all Islamic Scholars it wasn’t entirely clear, the context was Sunni) who believe the Holocaust happened. Now that’s truly frightening. There is still a lot of hatred towards Jews. And this brings me to the dark side of religion. Religious beliefs form a fundamental part of people’s world views, and those world views are a very strong cognitive bias for denying information that has been discovered or learned academically in secular society. The priest at my former Church pretty much disagrees with any Biblical Scholar that is not a Trinitarian Christian, for example. In fact I may as well re-post my video on social stigmas, it’s only 3 minutes so check it out:

Baxter, D. 2016. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (Aus). Originally published at: https://youtu.be/HMdl-VDRg9I

Religious tolerance is a necessary part of a free society. But don’t for a second think that all religions are capable of reform. Scientology was built on the premise that Psychiatry was a pseudoscience. They also deny the Holocaust. Now just to be clear – Holocaust denial is “the belief that the Holocaust did not occur as it is described by mainstream historiography” (source), and the type of denial perpetrated by Scientologists is that they believe psychiatrists were to blame.

But this brings me full circle. What we consider to be extreme beliefs were once mainstream beliefs. Eugenics was once the majority view in psychiatry, and psychiatrists did pay an active role in the Nazi extermination programs, including before and after the Final Solution. Hate and distrust of Jews was once mainstream. It was less than 100 years ago that we discovered there are galaxies in the universe other than our own. And I see one very important similarity between Imam Tawhidi and Jesus of Nazareth: both men wanted to reform their religion, and both have faced persecution from religious authorities in their religions. And both were/are exceptional human beings.